Neverwhere

I could call my 2007 "The Year of the Books" because I was such a frenzied bibliophile then. There was a month when I devoured 3 books a week.

Alas, those days didn't last. The tires went screech, midyear, with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle's 600 pages of droning. Mind you I read similarly long books (like Battle Royale and Grapes of Wrath) in the months before that. Wind Up began with me going "OH EM GEE LOOK AT HOW HE'S BEEN PULLING DA RIGHT CHORDS HE'S A GENIUS U RAOWK MURAKAMI \m/!" but by page 200, when the story needed to wrap, it rambled on to the point that my good will for Murakami became hostility. And come some harrowing subplots, and they nearly made Wind Up good again, but only convinced me that Murakami should stick to short stories. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows followed, and it was a Deus Ex Machina "hey, it's magic" mill. And I’ll just as soon call Avenged Sevenfold's music videos “brilliant” as I would call Ron/Hermione melodrama “poignant”. Yucky angst. Good Omens (by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett) tried too hard to make me laugh because apparently I took Deathly Hallows’s angst too seriously. Tried, by footnoting their “humor”. These 3 lackluster books dragged my reading speed: they took me six months to finish.

So when I started Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (just after he let me down, no less. See how dumb I am?), I was languid, weary and cynical - if it sucked, well, let’s just call it another day huh?

Turned out, I was being paranoid. Neverwhere made reading fun again!

Neverwhere starts with Richard. He could be your cubicle neighbor, he could be you. He is a typical London yuppie and his life is unremarkable, but he feels like the luckiest man alive because he has a girlfriend that looks like Jessica Alba (I imagined her like that since they share the same name, and that also makes it easier to make Richard me, vicariously). What do you do if your girlfriend is Jessica Alba? You marry her, loonies. So yes, Richard isn’t a loony. He is getting engaged to Jessica. Come the FATED DAY™, he rescues a wounded girl he found at the roadside, making him cancel his appointment with Jessica. This makes Jessica furious.

The wounded girl – named Door – recovers, and then disappears. Richard expects everything to become normal again but as he heads off to work, he finds himself rejected by the world and ignored by everyone, even Jessica. (At this moment, I feel like him because Jessica doesn’t even know I exist.) He doesn’t know why it happens, but he thinks it has to do with Door. So he begins searching for Door, and that leads him to world very different to his: to the London Underground.

London Underground is a world that is a reject of ours. It is home to those who pass off as hobos in our world, and also of rats and other weird beings. Unlike our world, London Underground is supernatural, and few of its inhabitants - such as Door – can do magic. It has a market that always changes locations, and a subway that isn’t visible to us. It is mostly peaceful (if less than tidy), but it has a few inhabitants that do not have the best intentions. Those that injured Door, for instance, live here. And Richard, in his search for Door, gets caught in a murder plot. Will he reach Door before it’s too late? And will he find a way to exist in our world again?

Because of London Underground's varied sights, cultures and people, Neil Gaiman created a world that's fascinating. The characters, too, are well-written, and easily loved or hated: Richard is an everyman that stays affable because he is everyman in the truest sense, unlike other authors’ contrived everymen who still manage to get their pants removed by all women characters. Murakami, learn! The cutthroat duo of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar is menacing without remorse; they’re not some albino assassins working for a so-called higher goal. Classic villains without jaded pasts have become passe, but Neverwhere relives the (fun) days back when they are feared and hated instead of forcibly sympathized. There are loads more.

Neverwhere is sincere. It does not pretend to be profound by pulverizing you with pseudo-metaphysical New Age gobbledygooks (unlike Paolo Coelho), nor does it resort to Good Omens’ irritating parody-everything. It is instead a straightforward tale in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Not entirely artsy, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying fun-for-fun’s-sake stories, and anyway Gaiman has written other tales that fill your more intellectual (and resent-of-money) needs. To use a loose analogy, if Gaiman’s Sandman is his Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, then Neverwhere is his Hard Day’s Night.

It isn’t without flaws, though. Door, for one, is very likable if you don’t realize that she’s just a recycle of Death (from Gaiman’s Sandman series). Gaiman sure loves his perky goth chick, huh? A few characters get glossed over, inspiring “what happened to them” discussions from Starbucks frap-swirlers who try to sound smart and literate. These problems are minor and they don’t affect the main plot.

Overall, Neverwhere succeeds in drawing me into its Neverland-reminiscent world, and I had a great time with it. Props to Neil Gaiman.